Honor's Code

To steal a phrase from my buddy BigBearButt , you are getting a Hammerwall (wall of text) today. Hammer Log 23 January 2015 through 27 January 2015 I'm in a weird spot with Soma. I'm raiding with them, but I'm not in their guild and I'm not keen on transferring to Kil'jaden anytime soon. They are one of better PUGs out there and I guess they think I'm one of the better PuG tanks they've come across (why else would they have moved their schedule)? Still it feels more like a hotel than a home. One thing I've noticed looking at both the ingame LFG tool and the Guild Recruitment forums is that there seems to be more openings for Healers and Ranged than Tanks or Melee. I love the Paladin class and I don't want to play anything else right now. Ranged DPS isn't an option, but healing is. I'd love to be able to go to a guild and tell them I could play any of the three specs and slot into what they need. My experiments with DPS as Prot had giv...

Hammer Log 22 January 2015 The next raid night, we made the decision to go after High Imperator Mar'gok instead of working on other Heroic bosses. The week we went 5/7, the group had returned on the weekend and gotten some work on High Imperator with a PuG tank and had gotten to Phase 4. I was new to the fight and it took me a couple of pulls to learn all the mechanics. The fight is pretty crazy. I had to keep track of Mar'gok's Accelerated Stacks and taunt when they got too high. We were using 8 as our benchmark. I also had to watch the cooldown on Mark of Chaos because the Monk was supposed to have him each Mark and then I was to immediately taunt him back. When we got to Phase 3, I had to move halfway between our two tanking positions right before the cast so I could taunt, run to the new position away from the Brewmaster and setup shop again. It took me a couple of attempts to get a good feel of everything. You can read all the strats in the world and watch all th...

I'm a little behind in posting. I've got the next 6 days worth of posts written so what you are seeing is actually stuff that happened last week. I'm going to post over the weekend to try to get caught up even though not many people stop by those days. Hammer Log 20 January 2015 The next week I started back with Café Soma. They've got about 6 guys (or gals, ya never know) who are consistently showing up for their raids and the rest are pugged off Open Raid or the in-game Looking For Group tool. We blew through the first 5 bosses with little issue and before long we were standing before Ko’ragh again. They had run over the weekend and developed a new strategy. We kited Ko’ragh around the edge of the circle on the floor in his room and ranged followed us. It made it easier to deal with the void zones. We also had a better composition this time around with more magical DPS. The Brewmaster did a great job of picking up the adds and we waited until we had almost of the...

On the raiding front, I had sent a message to the guys from Open Raid (Cafe Soma) explaining why I wasn’t going to sign up for raids the following week (or ever again really). I’ve always heard Raid Leaders and Guild Leaders talk about how they like to know why people left. I explained about the PVP server issue and that they simply ran too late for me to continue running with them. I was hurting the next day after I stayed up late with them. The next reset I ran with a different group. These guys were on a PVE server and I could tell as soon as I got into their vent, it was going to be a different experience. You could tell they were comfortable with each other and everyone was really friendly. I was given a tank role with a Druid and off we went. Unfortunately, it didn’t go well at first, and we wiped 2 or 3 times on Normal Kargath. The Druid tank switched over to heals and we brought in someone’s friend who had a well geared Tankadin. We one-shot Kargath on the next pull. It amazi...

Blizzard released the patch notes for 6.1. Paladin specific items were broken down into a couple of different sections but I have combined them all into this post. Talents Empowered Seals (Protection, Retribution) has been improved. Liadrin’s Righteousness now increases haste by 20% (up from 15%). Uther’s Insight now heals the Paladin for 2% of maximum health (up from 1%). It looks like they are trying to make Empowered Seals more attractive. Before this buff Theck and the theorycrafters at Maintankadin had worked out that: ES is still in last place post-haste-buff. Worse for survival than HS, and not a very large DPS gain over HS either (obv a DPS loss compared to Sera). And again, this is played perfectly juggling all 3 buffs. The penalty for error with ES is probably just as large as Seraphim since all three of the buffs are pretty significant effects. If your uptime on any of the buffs is <75% you're probably better off with Holy Shield. -  Source Given that stance...

I got the new “3rd Tank” set up and decided to test it out. If you recall from last week, this involved going Execution Sentence, Sanctified Wrath, Seraphim, Harsh Words, Focused Shield, Final Wrath and using Seal of Righteousness. Harsh Words replaced Shield of the Righteous in the rotation. After I set up my spec, and bought about 25 Tomes of Clear Mind, I went to the Target Dummy in my Garrison. I managed about 12k DPS, which wasn’t too terribly off from what I was doing as Ret. I decided to give it a test in the Proving Grounds. I had already completed the Silver Challenge DPS in my Retribution spec, but I wanted to start slow and fired up the Bronze Challenge DPS. That went well, almost easy. Next up I tried the Silver Challenge. This took me 4 or 5 tries as Retribution back when I first hit Level 100. I remember reading somewhere that the Proving Grounds scale up with your gear so the fact I have much better gear now than I did then shouldn’t have a big impact. It took me about...

In Burning Crusade era 25 man raiding, 3 tanks were the norm. That's actually how I got my in with a Tier 6 guild. I was their 3rd tank. It wasn't a great job, especially in the days before dual spec, but it was good first rung on your way up the tanking hierarchy in a guild. The idea has returned with the penultimate boss of the current Highmaul raid, High Imperator Mar'gok. " 3-tank Heroic/Mythic Imperator Mar'gok " High Imperator is a crazy 5 phase fight that challenges all groups even down to LFR. Every even phase is an 'intermission' where Mar'gok becomes unattackable and the raid deals with a set of adds. In the second intermission (or 4th phase) an additional add called a Reaver spawns. The Reaver is a melee and hits like a truck. He needs a tank. At the same time this is happening the two tanks still need to pick up the Warmages and Volatile Anomalies. The Reaver also periodically knocks his tank back and drops aggro. Handling all this ...

January 15  Class Paladin Protection   Reduced the damage of Seal of Truth for Protection Paladins by 80%. Protection Paladins should primarily use Seal of Insight for defensive value. [Currently in Testing]Seraphim now grants 750 of each stat for Protection Paladins (down from 1000). Double post today becuase this is what happens when I've scheduled a post and the Developers put out a bit of news. I read the statement "Protection Paladins should primarily use Seal of Insight for defensive value." as basically the developers saying that Protection Paladins should always be using Seal of Insight. Okay, that's fine, but if Seals aren't supposed to be a choice, then why not just make them passives. Prot and Holy get Seal of Insight. Retribution gets Seal of Truth. The Seraphim change is still in testing but maybe its related to the Haste change, which in retrospec seems like a strange change to make via Hotfix. Changing the value of Haste was bound to c...

I’m looking at how I want to set up my Loot Specialization when I run LFR. I’m trying to build the best tanking set I can while also amassing decent offsets for both Retribution and Holy. Clearly, I’m an ambitious guy. The loot table in LFR is different from the loot table in Normal/Heroic/Mythic. If the guild I eventually land in runs Personal loot, I’ll have to figure out what to run in those as well. I've been running as an OpenRaid PUG with Casa Soma the last two weeks as a tank. They run Personal loot and I've set Protection as my Loot spec on those runs. You could do this ingame through the Dungeon Journal but I like researching it ahead of time. I used Wowhead to look over the LFR loot tables. Head, Shoulders, Feet, Bracers, Legs, Chest, Hands, and Belt are easy. Those pieces are universal. They will be on your loot table regardless of your chosen specialization. One of the new features in Warlords is that plate gear has both Strength and Intellect on it, but the I...

Big news on the hotfix front for Protection Paladins. You can read the announcement on WoWhead . Secondary Stats  The Haste stat is now 11.1% more effective. For example, characters at level 100 now receive a 1% increase per 90 Haste (up from 1% per 100 Haste).  Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator) Protection   Sacred Duty now causes the Paladin to gain 30% (up from 5%) more of the Haste stat from all sources.  Glyph of Alabaster Shield now increases Shield of the Righteous’ damage by 3% (down from 10%) per stack. First off, hello haste. Second, ouch on the Alabaster Shield nerf. I'm still pretending I'm a maintankadin for the moment. I'm not sure if I will continue to Glyph Alabaster Shield though I'm not sure exactly what I'd swap it for. Normally, I run Alabaster, Consecrator, and Divine Protection. Maybe I'll replace Alabaster with Focused Shield. Theck, master of numbers and all things theorycraft, has a new blogpost out on the Ha...

I ventured back into the waters of OpenRaid this week and found a different group running Highmaul. I again signed up as a Tank with a DPS offspec. The event description said that invites would go out a half hour before the raid start so I got concerned when 15 minutes before the stated start time, I still hadn’t heard anything. I jumped over to the server of the raid leader and made a level 1 alt. I whispered him and soon after I had an invite to my RealID friends list. I hopped back on my main and got the raid invite a few minutes later. I asked him if he needed me to come as Prot or Ret and got really excited when he told me that they wanted me to tank. The guild that hosted the raid came from a PVP server and as soon as I joined the group and left my garrison I was flagged. It felt very strange to be running around flagged again. I grew up on PVP servers of Dark Iron and Altar of Storms so I know what it’s like to live on a PVP server, but it’s been a while. Unlike the pile of sk...

At iLevel 633 now and I’m still having no luck finding a new home. PUGging is tough as you already are getting the "link achieve" before you can get an invite and I have no Highmaul experience outside of LFR which I don't really count. With LFR in Warlords you can ignore almost everything and still win. Open Raid I've been using OpenRaid . If you aren't familiar, it is a site that lets groups advertise runs and players can sign up for events. It has a distinct advantage over the in game group finder in that you can find groups that will form all during the week. Today, I could sign up for a raid on Friday. The leader sets the event to Casual (relaxed atmosphere, but know the fights), Beginner (fights will be explained, wipes expected), Intermediate (basic reminders of the big things but know your stuff) or Extreme (wipe us and you are gone). This past weekend, I decided I would give it a try. I found a run with a newer guild on their first Highmaul run. It ...

Now that I had the gear for Heroics, I wanted to jump in and see what I could do. An old gaming buddy has been waiting patiently for my slow progress. He was actually the GM of the first guild where I truly felt like part of the team way back at Level 60. His main is a shaman these days and he's been running as a healer, but now that I can run as a tank, he can go as DPS (enhance I think). We started with a Random and got Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. I'm not going to lie, I was nervous heading in. Would I be able to survive? Would I mess up a mechanic? I took some solace in that we were on Vent together and he could talk me through the harder pulls. As we moved through the dungeon my confidence grew. I never died (credit to the healer who did a tremendous job) and without much fanfare we were facing down Ner’zul. Ner’zul??!!!??? Seriously? I couldn’t believe we were actually going to be fighting Ner’zul. THE Ner’zul. This was Gul’dan’s Yoda, the master who taught Gul’dan all ...