Honor's Code

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 let's look at what new goodies Blizzardclaus has under the Patch 3.0 tree. Hammer of the Righteous - This is your new 51 point talent in the Protection tree. What this does is hit the current target and 2 additional targets for 4 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage. This spell is on a 6 second cooldown and has a fairly low mana cost. As an added bonus, it is usable while you are silenced. The damage done is based on Weapon DPS and your Attack Power. It is designed to allow Protection Paladins to use actual Tank weapons like King's Defender, Su...

(Incoming Hunter Post) As I was finishing up Heroic Magisters Terrace, I got a tell from one of our Paladins who was sett ting up a Gruul's Lair run. I told him I would help out if needed. When I got into the raid, we had 2 other Protection Paladins plus a Protection Warrior plus a Feral Druid. I politely offered to bow out, but when the Raid Leader saw we only had one other hunter, he asked me to come in on Hummer. Sure, no problem. The Raid was 80% Dominion, 20% PuG so it took a couple of minutes to get organized. One of the PuG Shamans said he'd give 20g to anyone who pulled. Misdirect is fun! And he actually paid me the gold. We do finally get going and before long we are at High King Maulgar. I gave what tips I could to the Protection Paladins in the raid and got ready to Misdirect High King to the Main Tank. I targeted High King and moved to get into range. Certainly Blizzard wouldn't have made his aggro range larger than my range, right? "Crap, w...

Thanks to Matticus to telling me about this on Twitter. mmo-champion has produced a new Raid Composition tool, you can see it here: http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/ On the left you have all 30 'classes'. Every spec of every class is presented. In the center are your groups. I have no idea why they have this set up with 8 groups. You'd only ever see 8 groups (40 players) in AV and you have almost 0 control over the composition in that arena. Then on the right you have the raid buffs, and a count of Healers, Ranged, Melee, and Tanks. You drag the class from the left and drop it on the raid group slot. Your count is increased, and the buffs that you have covered light up in green. Let me pick a class/spec completely at random. Protection Paladin. There. Say you pull over a Protection Paladin and put them in group 1. Your Tank count goes to 1 and you can see Mana Restore (Judgement of Wisdom), Melee Attack Speed Slow (Judgement of the Just), and Healing Received (Impro...

Last night Dominion called a halt to all Raiding activities until we are level 80 in the Expansion. We had wanted to take one more good shot at clearing Black Temple before Patch 3.0 hit. Someone said it felt like the last day of school, and for me that wasn't that far off. A couple of people informed us they were going to app to a Sunwell Guild offserver. I can't imagine there are a lot of guilds still raiding, but you never know. Agamegnome announced he was taking a break from the game and wasn't sure when or if he'd be back. I was sad to see him go. Aga was the guy who recommended me to Dominion when there previous Paladin tank had decided to leave the game for AoC, and one of the people I felt closest to in Dominion. For me, I'm disappointed we didn't kill Illidan, but we did get to him and I did get to fight him. I got further in Burning Crusade than I did in Vanilla WoW so I guess I can be happy about that. It will be nice to have the pressure to...

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! Now I'm going to examine some of the familiar abilities that have been changed in Patch 3.0. Give Me A Hand Your utility Blessings: Sacrifice, Freedom, Protection, and Salvation are no longer Blessings, but a new category of spells called Hands. Hands work on the same one per Paladin rule as Blessings, but you can have a Hand buff and a Blessing buff on you at the same time. On Azgalor, we setup a Blessing of Freedom rotation to help our Tank kite Azgalor from the Tauren Warriors to Thrall. With each Paladin giving our Tank Blessing of Freedom, it meant that he lost ...

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! You know your class is in for major changes when it's entire combat system is rewritten. Seals and Judgments are the heart of the Paladin combat system. We seal up with one of many seals and Judge that Seal for damage, then reseal. That Seal, Judge, Seal rhythm is something you first experience around level 4 and keeps right on going all the way to the level cap. Until 3.0. On the surface the new Seal and Judgement system is a bit confusing but after you get used to it, it makes sense. Seal and Judgement Independence The major change you have to understand is that ...

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! This is Part 1 of a series of posts that covers the changes to Protection Paladins coming in 3.0. You could make a strong case that Paladins change more so than any other class, but we are going to start with the changes coming in 3.0 that affect all tanks and tanking in General. I'm going to assume for the moment that you have no prior knowledge of the changes. Combined Stats Many stats that effected spells and melee differently have been merged. Spell Hit and Melee Hit are now just Hit, and it affects both spell and melee. Crit and Haste were also combined to affe...