Honor's Code

Last night Mal Katai went back into Gruul's Lair. First up was good ole High King Maulgar. Last time we faced down the High King and his Council, I was Blindeye the Seer. This time however, I was teamed up with Raydz to tank Olm the Summoner. Raydz was going to get Olm misdirected to him, and I would taunt off Raydz when he got feared or got the debuff that Olm does up to 2 stacks. We pull. The pull is everything in this fight. Olm immediately fear Raydz and aggro onto Brindall our Main Tank. I taunt. Righteous Defense is a wonderful taunt, it really is. It taunts up to 3 attackers of your target onto you. And wouldn't you know it, Brindall has aggro on High King Maulgar, so when I taunted, I got him as well. It's a bonus! Olm melee + High King melee + Arcing Smash. Sometimes you're windshield, sometimes you're the bug. The next attempt he was to be misdirected to me. Something went wrong and the misdirect never happened. We did manage to get Olm under c...

Last night, while Tony Romo tried his best to give Buffalo a win over Dallas, Mal Katai was in a battle of its own with Gruul the Dragonkiller. This was the group of Mal Katai players who were in the raid to take him on. We had a little trouble getting up to 25 people. Strangely enough, what we needed was a Range DPSer, but eventually, we got everyone together and buffed up. My mission, and I chose to accept it, was to be the Hurtful Strike tank. This required me to be 2nd highest aggro in melee range. I've known for a while that my role for Gruul would either be Hurtful Strike Tank or Healer. Because of this, I've been preparing a special set of gear for the encounter. In this set of gear, which I refer to as my Offtank or Threat set, I'm running 362 spell damage. That is totally buffed with Superior Wizard Oil, Unstable Flask of the Sorcerer, and Blackened Basilisk. When you add in the 190 spell damage that Judgement of the Crusader gives you, its the equivalent to 552...

It's tough being a JC . We don't have any uber crafted epics. We can't craft anything of such power as to need a Primal Nether. But one thing we can craft (once you hit Revered with Honor Hold) is the Dawnstone Crab. At first I was not too impressed with this little baby, but the more I play, and the more I tank, the more I like it. Basically, what you have here is a blue version of Moroes Lucky Pocketwatch . What has happened is this has become one of my the first buttons I go for when things start getting a bit tight, that is anytime I drop under 40%. The dodge on this thing gives my healers a little time to catch up and has saved me from dying on more than one occasion . This along with my Darkmoon Card: Vengence are stables in my tanking set. I still use Figurine of the Collosus for AoE grinding. If you haven't been able to snag the Pocketwatch , or you are not in Kara yet, this is a good substitute. If you have the Pocketwatch and...

In all my Heroic Dungeons this weekend, my Healer has been a Resto or Tree Druid. I don't pretend to understand how other classes work. I'm doing good to understand my own class well enough to do a good job. I can't tell you the first thing about how Resto Druids, Resto Shamans, Holy/Disc Priests, or Holy Paladins heal. Well, I could tell you a bit about the Holy Paladin. The one thing I know with certainty is that these two Resto Druids (Baconstrip and Celoria) play extremely well. Twice over the weekend, I was able to run Heroic Mechanar with what has become a regular group of Mal Katai players. I'm not sure what Celoria is after for Badges, but I really enjoy helping her get it. Our group, as usual, was Me (Prot Paladin), Celoria (Resto Druid), Splinterdc (Warlock), MaxPayne (Warlock), and Raistalan (Mage). The 5 of us have run Heroic Mech together several times now. We know what to do, and how we all work together. This run started out pretty fun fo...

"If you are not in over your head, do you know how tall you really are" In between a couple of fantastic Heroic Mech, I got a tell from my old buddy, Wichita of Heroes Inc. He was asking if I would tank for Heroic Black Morass, generally thought to the be the toughest Heroic in the game. After some deliberation, I agree to the run. I know its going to be a repair bill, but I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. I get probably the best 4 players in Heroes Inc. Wichita, Elemental Shaman. Lakini, Balance Druid. Origami, Feral Druid. Baconstrip, Resto Druid. This was an A-Team. We start out clearing trash. Now, in most Heroics, Blizzard insanely buffed the trash, so we were cautious at first. No need. The trash is as easy in Heroic BM as it is in normal. So we start the event. I really enjoy all the Caverns of Time instances because they are very different than all the others. The first 5 portals go pretty well. The elites hit hard, but its not too...

Friday night I was invited to go with Group 1 into Kara and see how far we could get on one night. It was me (Prot Paladin) and Raydz (Warrior) doing the tanking, Doraellian (Priest), Celoria (Raven goddess) and Cellestia (Holy Paladin) doing the Healing, and Stdbakerhawk (Hunter), MaxPayne (Warlock), Trelic (Feral Druid), Raistilan (Mage), and Arbethon (Warrior) doing the hurting. I could tell something was wrong right from the start. I wasn't holding aggro very well and I was trying to raid lead at the same time. I haven't learned Mal Katai's normal symbols as of yet, so I was bit slow at first. We managed to down Attumen, but I didn't do a good job geneating aggro. I was struggling to do 200-300 TPS. I'm usually in the 500-600 range. I decided I was going to stop waiting around and buy my Season 2 Gavel as soon as the run was over. But then as we started to clear to Moroes I noticed something. Righteous Fury, the buff that makes Paladin tanking possibl...

Life has a funny way of throwing you a curve ball when you least expect it or in my case want it. My "day job" is in IT, computer programming to be precise, but my department is also tasked with the hardware side of the business as well. This is what I thought RAID was before I started WoW. This RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. I'd be shocked to find a server on the planet that didn't use it. Well last night as we were wrapping up our day, one of our RAID drives failed. This is usually not a big deal. You "hot swap" out the failed drive for a new one and it rebuilds the array and you go on your merry business. Oh, but not last night. Something really odd happened with the rebuild and the drive letters got all mixed up. We had running processes that were writing files to the wrong drives and it was a mess. So instead of raiding Gruul's Lair, I was spending my evening with an epic hard drive. By the time we got everything sorte...